Apache SSL Clustering with a Basic Load Balancer
Mar 28th
Recently I had a bit of a conundrum – I wanted to offer web-based FTP access to my friends who host on my personal cluster but I didn’t want to run a web server on that centralized machine. (disclosure: I have a vmForge VDC from ipHouse so I can rapidly prototype as needed)
Long story short, I decided to use relayd to answer on the outside interface for port 80 on the IP assigned to the file-server, and use phpWebFTP (looks ugly, works well) on my webcluster. I, however, wanted to use SSL for this server, which brought up its own challenge. How do I tell my Apache front-ends to serve up a different cert for this IP address. After some experimentation, I discovered the right process.
Speeding up JS, Playing Well with Others
Mar 28th
Another common trick for speeding up JavaScript on a web page is offloading some of it to other sites. Google Analytics and Google Ads are probably the most well-known and ubiquitous. Google also provides the Libraries API, a content distribution network (CDN) for jQuery, Prototype, and other common frameworks, and hosts small projects such as ie7-js. Facebook and Twitter offer their own frameworks for integrating with social media. Then there’s Typekit, which lets you load web fonts from their site, etc.
Since most web browsers limit the number of concurrent requests to any particular host, loading scripts from other sites can get your website to load from your server faster. For some sites, it’s also the best way for them to offer an integration API, with minimal concern for breaking old code (since they control it all).
However, there can be a downside. Loading lots of scripts from other servers makes your website more dependent on those servers, which are outside your control. If any of them are down or inaccessible, it affects the performance and usability of your website as well. I’ve encountered this more often as content offloading has become more common, and its pretty annoying when a page stalls completely for want of some trivial bit of fluff.
What do you think? Does offloading lead to a faster and more usefully integrated web? Or to a house of cards, ready to topple at the first server outage anywhere?
Monitor a Webpage with LogicMonitor
Mar 23rd
LogicMonitor automatically monitors an array of standard information about a web server, from CPU and memory use via SNMP to status and response time for a default HTTP query. If your web server performs a few critical functions, you can also monitor a specific page or service by URI.
Running suEXEC + FCGID
Mar 23rd
A long, long time ago (Internet years), our webmaster (and Mike) changed the ipHouse web-cluster to run PHP via FastCGI. They did this with the thought that FCGId would offer greater performance and stability while offering the same security as running PHP via the CGI interface.
Around the same time I also tried implementing FCGId in Ubuntu on one of my virtual servers. It worked well, but I thought it was a bit verbose. Recently, I took on the project to set up FCGId for a managed customer. I decided to ask our webmaster how he implemented FGCI via the FCGIwrapper primitive and still get suEXEC to work.
Quotas are Hard to Do
Mar 13th
In an ideal world maybe you wouldn’t have to worry about disk space. Hard drives would be inexpensive, reliable, and plentiful, and you could just store files endlessly without worry. I’d certainly enjoy that. The reality, of course, is that good storage costs real money, and allocation matters.
